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A few days ago I was chatting
with Jean, the mother of three small children, in the back yard of her
Sheffield home.

Jean pointed to rat poison
boxes, the fence gnawed by rats. “My children cannot play here, they are
frightened of the rats,” she said.

Jean (not her real name) is
an asylum seeker from North Africa. She finished a degree in England last
summer. Her home has water leaks, unsafe flooring, and damp walls which had
holes in them, back in April, when the family moved in. The house is managed under a government contract by the world’s
largest security company, G4S.

Unity and social justice

On the day that Home
Secretary Theresa became Prime Minister, she stood on the steps of Number 10
Downing Street and proclaimed her ‘mission’. It was “to make Britain a country that works
for everyone”. She spoke of “social justice”. She spoke of the union, not just
between the countries of the United Kingdom, “but between all of our citizens, every one of us, whoever we are and
wherever we are from”.

Remember that: “Everyone of us, wherever we are from.”

In late July the
UK government named the company that would run a helpline for
people who have faced discrimination on the grounds of their sex, race or disability.
The company? G4S.

Did it matter that G4S is
well known for the “unhealthy culture” and “endemic racism” noted by
the coroner at the inquest into the death of Jimmy Mubenga, an asylum seeker “unlawfully
killed” by G4S?

Over the past four years the
Home Office, under Theresa May, has come under
relentless criticism for the quality of asylum housing. There was the Children’s Society parliamentary inquiry in
early 2013, the Home Affairs select committee inquiry in 2013, the Public
Accounts Committee inquiry in 2014 — all reported on “atrocious” asylum
housing conditions. G4S and Serco were fined £5.6m for this fundamental breach
of the contract in 2012/13.

Something for parliamentary
Home Affairs committee to consider when it resumes hearings on the G4S, Serco
and Clearsprings asylum housing contracts on Tuesday 13 September.

Hostile environment

Lately I’ve been talking
with Angela. She was a G4S asylum tenant in 2012. I wrote then about how she had
found cockroaches in her baby son's bottle and slugs in the carpets.
Now a refugee settled in Leeds, Angela (not her real name) said: “I am really
shocked G4S still has that asylum housing contract, they have ruined the early
months and years of so many children.”

In May 2012, Theresa May, then Home
Secretary, told the Telegraph: “The aim
is to create here in Britain a really hostile environment for
illegal migration.”

The following month, G4S, along with Serco and the smaller Reliance security company (in partnership with Clearsprings housing company), were handed the £620m contract for housing people awaiting the outcome of their asylum claims. At the time, this was the largest contract ever given by the Home Office.

Over four years, working
alongside asylum seekers, I have witnessed and reported on the “hostile
environment”. I have seen its devastating impact on vulnerable lives.

John Grayson, BBC TV Inside Out programme March 2015

Catherine Tshezi, who was
dumped in a G4S/Jomast ‘mother and
baby’ hostel in Stockton in 2012, weeks after giving birth, said about her
experience there: “This really goes to show that the asylum seekers are not
respected. We are all human beings and we deserve respect and dignity.”

Cha Matty, a whistle-blower who exposed conditions in the
hostel in the Guardian and before a parliamentary inquiry told me: “They simply
want to make profits out of us, they show us no respect.”

When I interviewed her in
2012 she had been in the hostel with her toddler son for over a year. She said
she was “shocked and disappointed at how we have been treated by the powers
that be. How inhuman they are treating us, and we are just numbers for them in
making a profit which is very unfair and sad”.

“There are currently 18 women and 15 children living
in the property in Hounslow, which is two terrace houses knocked together …. Residents
have complained of infestations of rats in the kitchen, bedbugs and slugs,
filthy conditions, leaks, naked wires left exposed and periodic infestations of
cockroaches.”

Good enough for an asylum seeker

Stuart Monk is owner and managing director of Jomast, a property company
based in the north east of England, that “strives to relentlessly
pursue improvement in all aspects of its business” according to its
publicity material.

Rupert Soames, grandson of
Winston Churchill and CEO of Serco, in June 2015 told BBC Radio 4’s
cheerleading business programme ‘The Bottom Line’ that the new outsourcing
market: “makes Britain now to public service provision what Silicon Valley is
to IT”.

The winners

In the first three
months of 2016 new public sector contracts worth
£1.35 billion were announced in the UK – sixty five per cent of
all outsourced contracts.

In a close and cosy world, outsourcing
companies provide well paid positions to former politicians and other prominent
public figures. In 2009, John Reid, while still a
serving Member of Parliament, took a £50,000-a-year
“consultancy” role at G4S. They made him a director — from July
2010 until April 2013. And Reid, a former Labour Home and Defence Secretary has
continued to promote the
security industry’s wares in the House of Lords.

G4S board members have
included Lord Condon, former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and Adam
Crozier, head of ITV. Current chairman John
Connolly, once Britain’s highest paid accountant — at Deloitte —
also chairs the board at the Great Ormond Street Hospital charity, and was an
advisor to Mayor of London Boris Johnson.

Fence gnawed by rats in Jean's back yard (John Grayson)

The Telegraph in April 2016
estimated that in 2011/2012 the Home Office spent £150million providing
accommodation for asylum seekers, in 2014/15 it is thought to
be closer to £200million.

Stuart Monk, owner of G4S
contractor Jomast is reported to be worth £175m.

James Vyvyan Robinson CEO of
Clearsprings, formerly of G4S, has an annual salary of more than £200,000.
Graham King, the founder and chairman of Clearsprings, trousered £960,000 from
the company in 2014.

Over the past few months,
along with other members of SYMAAG, an asylum rights group, I have been
attending small ‘hearings’ in Yorkshire held to collect evidence for the Home
Affairs Committee from G4S asylum housing tenants. The evidence continues to
reveal a picture of filthy properties, G4S staff invading the privacy of
tenants’ homes, and vulnerable and traumatised tenants being neglected.

Tenants attending the
hearings and the many tenants I have worked alongside over the past four years
have had the courage to raise their voices against the disrespect and abuse
they have faced in their asylum homes. Will the peoples representatives take
action this time? Will they force G4S, Serco and Clearsprings off the asylum
housing contract? If not, why not?